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Last week we saw how Email Search could be killing your productivity. Here's a tip to help you beat this time suck and reclaim your day:

Stop organizing your email into folders
Using folders to organize your inbox may seem like the most sensible thing to do. Truth is, the organizational benefits of folders are merely an illusion. This IBM study which found that email users who spend time putting their messages in folders are no more successful at "re-finding" them than users who simply let their inboxes grow, agrees with us too.

IBM Researchers gave 345 email users access to an email client that supported a variety of email management techniques, including folders, search, tagging and threading of messages. The users made 85,000 attempts to find old messages over the course of the study. Ultimately, the study found that those who did no email organizing at all, found their emails faster than those who filed them in folders.

Organizing your email into folders actually delivers a double-whammy: not only do you spend time creating folders (and mail rules to populate them) and maintaining them, but you also invest more time than you should while searching for an email that you need. The greater the number of folders, the greater the amount of time you spend searching (each folder in turn) for your lost email.

So if folders aren't the best solution, how do you cope with your inbox? How do you access the messages you need, quickly?

Easy. Get yourself a good email search tool. Today, there are several paid and free tools available which can simplify your life and greatly enhance your email search experience. A simple Google search should yield a bunch of these tools that you can research and compare, to find the one tool that perfectly meets your unique email search needs.

Psst! Here's a shortcut to finding the perfect FREE email search tool - get the FREE FewClix Personal Edition here.